THIS GUY KNOWS HOW TO RUB IT IN
MAHOMES JUST GETTING STARTED IN REMINDING BEARS, OTHERS EXACTLY WHAT THEY PASSED OVER IN 2017 DRAFT
AVENTURA, Fla. — Patrick Mahomes won’t let the Bears forget he could’ve been theirs. He doesn’t even have to say it. His play is a constant reminder.
But in December, he was compelled to drive home his point during the Chiefs’ blowout win at Soldier Field by counting to 10 on his fingers as he trotted back to the sideline after a touchdown pass. Three years later, with an MVP trophy in hand and a championship within reach, he’s still rehashing the 2017 draft like the rest of us.
In Chicago, they remember the quarterback picks by heart: Mitch Trubisky at No. 2 to the Bears, Mahomes at No. 10 to the Chiefs, Deshaun Watson at No. 12 to the Texans.
The what-ifs from that draft are a tangled mess. The first four teams to pick — the Browns, 49ers, Bears and Jaguars — all had glaring quarterback needs and have been answering for missing on Mahomes ever since. Even with his team in the Super Bowl on Sunday, 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was questioned about it this week. (The 49ers cleaned up their mistake reasonably well by trading for Jimmy Garoppolo six months later.)
Nobody plays the what-if game when they get it right. The hypotheticals of the 2017 draft are a constant attack on Bears general manager Ryan Pace’s job security, but they elicit a chuckle from Chiefs coach Andy Reid.
What if it had played out differently, and the Bears or some other prescient team had seen what the Chiefs — including then-offensive coordinator Matt Nagy — saw and plucked Mahomes at the top?
“Well, then we wouldn’t have Pat,” Reid said, spending about a millisecond musing about it. “And he’s pretty good.”
He’s great. Transcendently great for the Chiefs, and hauntingly great for the Bears.
As Reid recalled this week, the Chiefs didn’t worry much about teams preempting them. For all of Pace’s CIA-style tactics to cloak the Bears’ interest in Trubisky, he tipped his hand enough for the Chiefs to see he wasn’t in on Mahomes.
“Because of the media attention that gets put on the draft — and around that time, people talk — we had a pretty good idea who was interested and who wasn’t,” Reid said. “[We knew] who was out there and who the threats were.”
Trubisky, Mahomes and Watson will be linked forever, even if Trubisky fizzles out of the league. Mahomes is king, Watson will spend the next decade admirably striving to dethrone Mahomes, and Trubisky is a trivia answer, like Sam Bowie going before Michael Jordan in 1984. All three punched Canton into their GPS, and two are already on the road. The other got a flat tire backing out of his driveway.
“I think it’s just understanding that they’re all different,” said Pace, who bet his job on Trubisky by trading up to take him and is still desperately trying to convince everyone it was the right move. “It’s just case-by-case. There’s all different backgrounds and scenarios and situations they’re in. I think you’ve just got to recognize that.”
One lingering debate is whether Mahomes or Watson would have still been this good if he had landed with the Bears instead. Both players are talented enough to rise above just about anything, but Mahomes knows he stepped into an ideal situation the day he was drafted. He can count to 10 all he wants, but no part of him wishes he had gone higher.
“Yeah, I ended up in the perfect place,” he said. “To have Coach Reid and these coaches, to have Alex Smith in front of me for a year and be able to learn from him and to have all these players around me — I’m in a place where the team was already a winning team. I came in and was able to be who I am, and I ended up winning a lot of football games early in my career.”
The exact number is 27 wins, including the playoffs, in 35 career starts. The Texans have gone 25-15 with Watson. Trubisky is 23-19.
Their individual statistics show a more pronounced gap. Watson and Mahomes have triple-digit career passer ratings and 70-plus touchdowns, while Trubisky is at 85.8 and 48 despite playing more games than either of them.
He’ll never escape that comparison. Neither will Pace. And the pain of that mistake will stick with the Bears long after both of them leave. ✶